Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2511.21222

Evaluation of an ITD-to-ILD Transformation as a Method to Restore the Spatial Benefit in Speech Intelligibility in Hearing Impaired Listeners

Timm-Jonas Bäumer·Johannes W. de Vries·Stephan Töpken·Richard C. Hendriks·Peyman Goli·Steven van de Par
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

To improve speech intelligibility in complex everyday situations, the human auditory system partially relies on Interaural Time Differences (ITDs) and Interaural Level Differences (ILDs). However, hearing impaired (HI) listeners often exhibit limited sensitivity to ITDs, resulting in decreased speech intelligibility performance. This study aimed to investigate whether transforming low-frequency ITDs into ILDs could reintroduce a binaural benefit for HI listeners. We conducted two experiments with HI listeners. The first experiment used binaurally phase-shifted sinusoids at different frequencies to evaluate the HI listeners ITD sensitivity threshold. All subjects had an increased ITD threshold at higher frequencies, with different ITD sensitivities between the subjects in the lower frequencies. In the second experiment, Speech Reception Thresholds (SRTs) were measured in different binaural configurations by manipulating Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs). The results showed that, despite the decreased ITD sensitivity, removing ITDs decreased SRTs by approximately 1 dB compared to the unprocessed baseline, where ITDs and ILDs are available. Furthermore, substituting low-frequency ITDs with ILDs yielded an improvement for a lateral target speaker. Adding the low-frequency ILDs while preserving the ITDs caused a significant improvement for speakers in all directions. These findings suggest that the proposed transformation method could be effective in restoring binaural benefits in HI listeners. The results of this study suggest the use of such transformation techniques to be implemented in hearing aids and cochlear implants, directly benefiting HI listeners.

Explore related subjects

eess.AS

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Timm-Jonas Bäumer, Johannes W. de Vries, Stephan Töpken, Richard C. Hendriks, Peyman Goli, Steven van de Par. 2025-11-26. Evaluation of an ITD-to-ILD Transformation as a Method to Restore the Spatial Benefit in Speech Intelligibility in Hearing Impaired Listeners. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21222

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Diarization Error Decomposition Under Pause Annotation Ambiguity

Speaker diarization evaluation is sensitive to ambiguity in pause annotation, which can inflate diarization error rate (DER) or obscure genuine model errors. We show that morphological closing, which has been used for pause-tolerant diarization evaluation, discards segment-level distinctions. Instead, we propose an exact, overlap-aware decomposition of standard DER into a pause-attributable component, consisting of errors compatible with pause filling, and a residual core component that can serve as a proxy for intrinsic diarization errors. The decomposition leaves DER unchanged, while the pause-attributable and core components vary monotonically with the pause threshold and eventually saturate. Experiments spanning synthetic transformations, annotation mismatch, cross-domain evaluation, and tight-boundary diarization show that the decomposition reveals error sources not apparent from standard DER.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2026

Less can be More: What Aspects of Speech Drive End-of-Turn Detection

In conversational AI, detecting when a speaker has finished talking is crucial for natural turn taking. While recent work incorporates semantics, the relative contribution of different modalities remains unclear. We present a controlled ablation of acoustic, prosodic, and semantic signals for streaming end of turn detection using a lightweight trimodal classifier. Under identical training conditions, the acoustic prosodic combination achieves the best balance of accuracy and latency, achieving utterance F1 of 0.93 with 7.8% false alarms at 400ms median latency. Adding text increases premature detections without improving performance. Feature space analysis confirms that prosodic features have the strongest class separability, while text representations overlap substantially. These findings suggest that turn-taking is primarily conveyed through intonation and silence patterns rather than semantic completeness, enabling faster and more reliable systems without expensive text inference.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2026

Downstream-Task-Aware Unified Source Separation

Task-aware unified source separation (TUSS) enables a single model to handle diverse separation tasks by conditioning on input prompts. However, conventional TUSS does not account for downstream task requirements, such as whether the enhanced speech will be used for human listening or automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this paper, we propose a prompt extension framework for TUSS that incorporates downstream task information into the input prompts and switches the loss function according to the given prompt during training, enabling outputs with different signal characteristics at inference time. Specifically, we introduce an ASR-dedicated prompt paired with a regularized loss function that reduces speech artifacts to improve ASR robustness, while the standard prompt is paired with the conventional SNR loss function. Experiments on the LibriSpeech and JNAS corpora demonstrate that the proposed joint-training scheme enables a single model to improve ASR performance over noisy input across a wide range of SNR conditions by selecting the ASR-dedicated prompt, while maintaining general speech enhancement quality when the standard prompt is used.

eess.AS↗